Why Campaign Studio Appeals to Marketers

As marketers, we spend a lot of time researching, analyzing, and testing to understand what our audiences are thinking and doing. 

It can be hard work, but it doesn’t have to be. Which is where marketing automation comes into play. Our own marketing automation software, Campaign Studio, is great at making my job much easier. 

How? I’ll show you. We’ll look at a few of my favorite Campaign Studio features and explore how each one helps my job feel like less work. 

Campaign Builder

Without a doubt, Campaign Builder is one of the best tools in my marketing arsenal. I love seeing a marketing automation plan come to life visually. With Campaign Builder, it’s like using a whiteboard to map goals and journeys. When I show a campaign outline to non-marketers, they can understand it without explanation. 

I have the ability to set and label each step and action, so whatever internal naming conventions I prefer, the tool can accommodate and adapt to my changes. There’s no need to follow strict rules associated with an email service provider (ESP); I have the freedom to design any flow I like. I’ll regularly drag-and-drop, rename, jump-to, and make as many connections as needed until my campaign automation resembles the London Tube. As my martech stack grows, I have peace of mind knowing that my marketing automation platform (MAP) can handle updates and integrations rather than create more steps to process. 

Campaign Builder also supports robust marketing initiatives, such as onboarding customers to loyalty programs. Usually, brands have a lot of information they want to share with new members upfront — how to use their app, how rewards work, when to expect communications or alerts; a well-planned email marketing strategy can be executed using Campaign Builder to deliver these important details over time without bombarding your list. 

I can set emails to drip at specified intervals and ask the system to make decisions in real time based on the customers' path or behavior. Maybe I have contacts who need to add a payment method or update their communication preferences — Campaign Builder’s options allow me to personalize messages based on different decisions. Plus, I can execute more than just email. Campaign Builder allows me to send SMS and social media messages, as well as perform webhooks, and more!

And other teams easily navigate Campaign Studio’s simple layout, avoiding the hand-holding explanations that other platforms require. 

Focus Items

A simple feature that powerfully improves any workflow, Focus Items let you place a notification, form, or link on your website in a bar across the top or bottom of the page, modal window, or lightbox. It can also be formatted as a sliding notification or full-page overlay. 

There are four basic steps for creating a Focus Item: 

1. Decide what you want the focus to be. This could be a form prompting an email newsletter sign up, a link to a new product, or a message about upcoming site maintenance work.
    
2. Choose when to engage with a record. Some brands display a message after a visitor has been on their site a few seconds; others immediately display a pop-up. I’ve also had messages pop up when I scroll over something specific or about to click to exit. In the settings, you have the option to control when engagement opportunities arise during the customer journey.
    
3. Style the Focus Item. Focus Items have many different looks that you can edit in the settings. Picking the style allows you to choose which design you believe will most impact your audience. Pick a bar that spans the whole screen or choose a small square form that will appear front and center on your homepage. (Go ahead and test the options!). Control the Focus Item to be on-brand with your design guidelines. Set fonts and colors and even use HTML if you want to really personalize the message beyond the default options.
    
4. Publish and unpublish. One of the best parts about Focus Items is the ability to publish and unpublish them directly in Campaign Studio. If I have a webinar I’m driving registrations to, I make sure to unpublish the Focus Item after the webinar starts, and it immediately stops appearing.
    

I often use a Focus Item when we have new content to share with visitors. I also like to use the feature to invite visitors to upcoming webinars. Focus Items can be created quickly and can lead to big results. And whether you’re managing your own pages or giving the snippet of code to someone else on the team who owns website updates, Campaign Studio has built this feature to ensure it’s a simple handoff.

Journey Builder

This is the platform’s campaign- and automation-building feature. It brings life, mobility, and agility to the Campaign Studio platform as a whole. Journey Builder is most helpful in three distinct ways: 

Contact management: Good contact management and hygiene are the foundation of any successful marketing program — and the ease in which marketers can communicate with those contacts is what distinguishes successful campaign builders from mediocre ones. Campaign Studio’s Journey Builder enables marketers to easily segment and communicate with contacts in a few simple clicks. Because of Journey Builder’s power and versatility, marketers will find themselves using it for a wide range of contact management tasks.

Campaign management: Whether you’re building a simple follow-up campaign for a webinar or an extensive, quarter-long nurture, Journey Builder can help you efficiently achieve success. Because Journey Builder can interact with so many components both within and outside of Campaign Studio, marketers will find it easy to build and edit extensive campaigns. Journey Builder can send emails, score contacts, pivot based on actions taken by the contact (such as form fills or webinar attendance), and communicate all of this to your CRM. Marketers can make edits to any step in the journey and see the impact right away.

Integrations management: As part of an open marketing solution, Journey Builder not only blends seamlessly with components within Campaign Studio but also with various tools in an organization’s martech stack. Gone are the days when marketers would update contacts in one platform only to open another platform to apply those same edits. Journey Builder can serve as the glue between multiple platforms marketers use. 

Forms

The B2B world loves a good form, and Campaign Studio’s form builder makes it quick and easy to create and launch all the forms I need to gather that coveted customer data. 

I’m most impressed with what I can accomplish after a contact fills out one of my forms. I’m not just talking about applying hidden fields; I’m talking about the ability to send external and internal communications, apply tags to the contact, and export results directly from the form page. Campaign Studio’s open marketing approach allows you to sync your forms with different sites and tools like Zoom or Salesforce to ensure leads and customer behavior is captured. 

Intuitive editing

One aspect of Campaign Studio that’s sometimes overlooked but which I, an everyday user, regularly rely on when writing campaign content, is its ability to recognize edits and apply them to different features. 

If I change the name of an individual email or cadence, this edit carries over to the other channels and components of Campaign Studio. I’m always after the best way to organize my account and assets, so sometimes I need to change naming conventions. Whatever I edit in the “Emails” feature of Campaign Studio is automatically edited in other platform areas like Campaigns and Forms. 

Nurture campaigns should be fluid like Campaign Studio’s Campaign Builder, where edits are picked up and implemented without downtime. Impactful marketing campaigns aren’t successful when they’re static. Editing and making enhancements to continually improve engagement and conversions from customers is a constant goal for marketers, and marketing automation tools need to keep up — which Campaign Studio does.

Want to see Campaign Studio work its magic? We’d be happy to help. Request a demo, and we’ll show you the way.